Reflections on Turning 44

Today, I am 44.

At 44, I’m more powerful in philosophy than I was when I started ten years ago, and I know this grows with time. I will be the William James scholar I wish I was at 60 rather than capable of that now, especially if I remain teaching a 6/5 load; I must accept that. I’ve thrown in with more process thought than phenomenology, and I am sacrilegious against core phenomenological commitments for metaphysical reasons I never knew I would have. And it was James that made me aware of that fact, which also proves that one can be like Putnam. It’s okay to change one’s mind rather than be forever casted as a “Continental” or “analytic” or something like “a Kantian.”

At 44, a lifetime of scholarly questioning has made me free from much of the religious baggage that still weighs on me; it’s not gone. It’s still there. I am now willing to admit that the religious baggage might always be there.

At 44, I have a wonderful wife of 17 years, and is, perhaps, the only thing I’ve done right. 19 years if we count the 1.5 years of dating.

While I have been a professor, the culture wars of politics have only served to undermine philosophy and the humanities more and more. As I get older, I have become more progressive, not less. I am somewhere between a pragmatist commitment to democracy as a way of life and the impatience with institutionalized oppression from critical theory. At 44, I now see what I should have seen when I was 30. The Democrats are at their best only Centrist Leftists; they are incapable of addressing race as the Republicans who have been taken over by the Far Right.

At 44, I am still confused. This confusion only fuels more writing, not less. I have questions now about race that my Black brothers and sisters have been answering for decades. I now see the necessity of reading them, and it is their lived-experiences that I measure the health of this nation. I am as disgruntled as Rev. Dr. King was in the mid-1960s till his death. I’ve thought about what-if historical fiction had King been the President of the United States or would it just have wound up being as it was for us–only instead of Trump’s blatant racism as a reaction to Obama, Barry Goldwater or David Duke would have been the President to follow in King’s wake.

At 44, I am now open to mentoring younger philosophers. I know that I am only here because of the countless hours of talking various challenges out with people like Anthony Neal or Aaron Simmons or friends from grad school. I can’t tell you how many conversations and resources Jason Hills and I have talked through.

At, 44, I’m happy to admit my unpopular hot take that despite the challenges of my “analytic” MA, I know it made me a better writer. I would have came out more interesting had I stayed at Essex for their MA and I would have been more in debt had I taken up New School’s offer for a Ph.D.. In trying to earn acceptance from analytics and Continentals after my Ph.D., I should have just been a damn pragmatist. I gave too much power to that distinction, and many have internalized it as I have for good or ill. It still has some power over me, but I can resist it now.

At 44, I still love the games of my youth and I regularly reconnect with people my age over the nostalgia of 90s tabletop RPG games. The resurgence of tabletop RPGs has come at a heavy price of D&D controlling the imagination of what such games can be, so I must always network and find older gamers that remember a time in the 90s when there existed maybe five publishers of RPGs rather than just one. I also know that I will always be connected to this gamer culture since even the younger people acted as I would have in my 20s at corporate shenanigans of Hasbro trying to silence the Open Gaming License of third-party developers that makes D&D so popular. The kids are alright sometimes, especially the gamers.

At 44, I had the thought that I don’t want to be double my age. I’ve been thinking about my grandfather and my parents. As I see the possibilities of human relationships and love, the anxiety of future loss not yet present, and my own finitude, I know that these now can take hold of you. When Kierkegaard wrote about despair and anxiety, I didn’t know that existentialism would be more powerful as I grew older. Their thought shines more brilliantly because one can feel their truths more than when we ignore these sources of anxiety in our 20s and 30s.

At 44, my body gives out sometimes in unanticipated ways. Each pain is like a trailer for a movie you never want to see but somehow you are forced to (like a Wes Anderson movie).

At 44, I’ve been thinking long and hard about what I want out of life. I want to do more art, not less. Photography and writing should be my outlets. This year I will work on trying to publish some poems I have lying around. I will experiment with first-person narration and present tense technique as I imitate the superb prose of Erin Morganstern. These are my thoughts on this day.

Truth-Seeking and Holding Sand

Pragmatism gives me permission to rest in something, to take an idea out for a spin and apply it to my life and to yours. This rest is for a short while. Truth-seeking requires the attitude of the experimentalist. The idea might not be that good, so I go out to experiment again. Eventually, I am allowed to rest, to stop seeking and to live by the consequences of my decision of the sacred, even if it’s a leap into the absurd as Kierkegaard might have it, a disenchanted place of illusions as Nietzsche might have it, or the religious naturalism one finds as a consequence of radical empiricism. It’s my will-to-believe. But I am still restless. I cannot rest in any one thing; I want to understand how all ideas give rise to the novelty I cannot anticipate about the sacred. And this is where James seems to be, even regarding panpsychism. He is always in the transitions, the space and interval between relations, yearning for the more to give hope and expression to a vision for the final arrangement that by definition does not come to those who embrace an unfinished world. I am always stuck in the between moments. I know more clearly what to reject than to affirm. The Divine escapes conceptualization if there is a Divine, and I know not what interpretation to give it. It’s like holding sand.

Pragmatic Belief in Moral Realism: A Brief Note

I believe in normativity as such, and offered my own version of moral realism once long ago. I cannot side with the Nietzschean-Foucaultian synthesis about moral judgments in Continental philosophy. In such an approach, first Foucault and Nietzsche are moral skeptics. In their thinking, moral reasons are constructions of contingent facts of language, history and habit that give rise to forms that legitimate various forms of power differentiations in interpersonal relationships. Instead, reasons and value are given as such. Now, I used to think Scheler’s phenomenological ethics provided the ontological ground of those moral reasons/values/normativity as such, and Scheler was just not that clear about the phenomenological ontology necessary to account for what values and reasons are. (I use values and reasons interchangeably to mean a reason for acting).

For the first few years in grad school and beyond, I still retained a hint of the ethical nonnaturalism that once animated my analytic fascination with Ross and intuitonism (Remember the Stratton-Lake collection on intuitionism, Audi’s synthesis of Kant and Ross, or Huemer’s book). I found Scheler to be a nonnaturalist alongside Husserl. Now, I just insist that in people assuming moral realism true, it makes more pragmatic sense of our practices. Put another way, people are in a better place to evaluate their practices and openly question and improve upon what reasons they should act upon when they think there is a moral order of reasons/normativity in which some reasons are better and therefore more true than others. In essence, there’s more pragmatic upshot to people assuming moral realism true from not assuming it true. In this way, Scheler’s givenness of value is simply being the type of evolutionary creatures that can “perceive” what we might all be constructing or discovering reasons to be true. I cannot, however, think that there are clear knock-down arguments for whether or not we construct morality to be true or discover moral reasons as true. Truth is only a word that signals to me that a particular reason for acting is working above some other conception. In assuming reasons the type of statement that could be true in a way described by moral realism, I accept the following five conditions:

1. Communicative Condition: As an agent, persons accept that others communicate their intentions and responses to me as a person with reasons.
2. Intelligibility Condition: Reasons intelligibly express what is valuable to me and others and following Kant, all performed actions by persons can be translated into why I am responsible for x.
3. Responsibility Condition: Reasons express why it is that I did x or respond with y to another.
4. Bindingness Condition: Some reasons are better than other reasons, and in being better as true, they bind me to a standard of value that ought to be recognized.
5. Onto-Relationality Condition: Reasons are realized only by a person being in constant interpersonal relations with others and some conditions of the concrete world must persist in order to assist in realizing a value/reason.